Sunday, July 19, 2009

Discussing IDEs for IronPython is all the rage at the moment, and it is great that tool support is finally improving (and at an impressive pace). This post is by a developer called Mandar Vaze extolling the virtues of SharpDevelop for working with IronPython.

In my first post about IronPython, I documented how installing IronPython Studio was painful (Needed Visual Studio shell, which in itself was confusing). When I started with IronPython I did not know about any other IDE, hence I went ahead with IronPython Studio. But later I came to know about SharpDevelop.

IronRuby, the evil-twin of IronPython, has had a new release on the road to version 1.0. Jimmy Schementi announces and explains the release:

Performance has been a major focus to this release, getting startup time quicker and optimizing built-in types. There has been more progress with Ruby compatibility (Cucumber works!) and .NET interop. Silverlight binaries are back in the release, and there are a couple of samples to help you learn IronRuby.

Most of these descriptions are from Tomas's very detailed code review emails, so thanks Tomas! For more detailed information, please see the CHANGELOG (which includes all commit messages for the release ... not just "syncing to head of tfs")

On the subject of IronRuby, here's an interesting post on using .NET libraries - which needless to say is just as simple as from IronPython.

Whilst my example below is extremely trivial, it shows how you might make use of any existing libraries within your Ruby scripts. This same technique applies to any .NET libraries, whether they’re custom, part of the framework, or created by your gran. I don’t think I really need to sell it in – but I love the flexibility that this provides.

Slides of an IronPython / Mono presentation given to the San Luis Obispo .NET User Group. The presentation and demos (including embedding IronPython in C# applications) was given entirely from an Open Source stack: using Ubuntu, Mono, Monodevelop etc.

A Hanselminutes podcast on developing Banshee on the Mono platform. The Banshee Project is a cross-platform Media Player. It's a Mono Application that runs on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. The discussion includes how Banshee is scripted with the Dynamic Language Runtime.